Some Thoughts on the War

This piece from Oriana Falaci is a magnificent, almost poetic screed by a former Italian resistance fighter, a journalist who did her part to end the Viet Nam conflict, a former apologist for the PLO and Yasser Arafat, who is not afraid to come out on the side of the American government when that government is right. She says, in reference to those who advocate "peace":

I do not believe in vile acquittals, phony appeasements, easy forgiveness. Even less, in the exploitation or the blackmail of the word Peace. When peace stands for surrender, fear, loss of dignity and freedom, it is no longer peace. It's suicide.

Zev Chafetz, of the New York Daily News, says this about what the 21st century holds in store for the nations who would oppose us:

Bringing liberty to the people of Iraq would be a fine thing. Still, it is not the main thing. The goal of this war is to establish and enforce the new Golden Rule of the post-post-Colonial world order inaugurated in September 2002: Sovereignty is not an inalienable right. From now on, self-determination will belong to those people whose basic ethos and instincts do not pose a mortal threat to the United States, its interests and allies. The Iraqis and the other Arab nations may pass that test, or they may fail it. Once Saddam is gone, we will begin to find out.

Arnaud deBorchgrave, no fan of this war or this administration, just noted

A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."

We have all seen the latest polls. The world is coming around. Soon it will be as hard to find someone who admits he was against this war as it is to find one of my contemporaries who was not at Woodstock.